


And I built this balustrade to keep you home

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, Grief, M/M, Post-Nirnaeth Arnoediad, lyrics as prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 12:08:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20723966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Lyric prompt: "And I am nothing of a builder But here I dreamt I was an architect And I built this balustrade To keep you home, to keep you safe From the outside world" (And here I dreamt I was an architect, the Decemberists) + Maedhros





	And I built this balustrade to keep you home

Maedhros builds the cairn on his own, climbing up the rocky tor in a drizzle of fine mist, the sky leaden above. His boots sink into the stony mud, the slope half washing away in the rain. The rough, strewn rocks are slippery beneath his feet, and the wind blows; it’s unusual weather this far south, but the coldness to the north is spreading ever further these days. He barely notices, pausing only to wipe away the hair that’s been whipped into his face by the wind.

He picks up a rock, ragged, uncut by the hands of stonemasons. It’s all limestone here, grey-white and pockmarked, different from the pale golden sandstone from which Himring was built. He remembers poring over plans and sections pinned to a desk, drawing determinedly with his left hand, before he had even learned to use it properly. It hadn’t been beautiful on paper, not like it had been in his head, but he had got across the general idea, apparently, for others’ hands to refine. When it had been built it had been beautiful, in a sparse, functional way, if only because it had stood, and stood, and held the front lines for so long.

(It hadn’t been beautiful, as a place, but he remembers things that had made it beautiful; a familiar laugh, ringing off the sandstone. The sunlit glint and clatter of swords, sparring in the courtyard. The way the stones had felt, his back pressed up against them, a gentle warm pressure on his chest. The frigid bite to the night air, the suggestion to retire into the glow of firelit for the evening. A stone hearth, and long conversations in front of it, firelight catching on bright gold, in eyes like the sky. Yes, some parts of it had been beautiful, he thinks.)

Until it hadn’t, anymore. He hasn’t been back to the ruins. He hasn’t built anything since, until now; they had fled, after the battle, taken over abandoned places, homesteads and tumbledown keeps in the south. It had probably once been beautiful here too, green and bright, but now it’s just grey and ragged as he is. 

He hefts a rock between his gloved hand and the steel prosthetic, old and dinted. His brother used to tend to it for him, updating it each year, more often sometimes.

The rock comes down on top of the methodical, curving wall of the cairn. It’s not a custom of his own people, to build these; he learned about it in Hithlum, from the Edain. They built such things for their dead, those they had lost without hope of ever reuniting with again. Maedhros can understand that, and anyway, it isn’t as though he’d be much good at building any other sort of memorial.

He doesn’t have anything to put inside a tomb. There should be some token, he thinks. Something he can leave. But he’s been leaving every part of him behind for so long now, if he isn’t careful it won’t be long before there’s nothing left. He’s breathing hard with the effort now, lifting a large, flat stone to place at the very top like the keystone of an arch. Structural integrity, at least; that’s something he can still manage.

There’s nothing inside the cairn but memories; what should be inside it, is buried far beneath a hill of dead, far to the north, battered and broken beyond recognition. Or shouldn’t; nothing, nothing at all, is as it _should_ be, and never will be again.

Still, his memories will be safe here. At least, he thinks, he can still have that.


End file.
